Animating LEADER local development action in rural Austria
- CAP Implementation
- CAP Strategic Plans
- Communication
- Economic impacts
- Education
- Environment
- Evaluation
- Evaluation Methods
- Food Supply Chain
- Indicators
- Jobs, Growth and Equality in Rural Areas
- LEADER
- Long-term Vision for Rural Areas
- Monitoring
- Networking
- Rural Development
- Socio-economic Impacts
- Sustainability
- Targets & Milestones
- Tourism
LEADER Local Action Groups in Austria benefit from strong cooperation at national level, which is animated through coordinated actions by the country’s National Network and LEADER Forum.
LEADER areas and their projects reflect their countries' unique character and diversity. Exploring the Austrian landscapes, one can find former volcanos, vineyards, lakes, meadows, forests, the beautiful Alps, and much more. LEADER allows rural areas to support projects tailored to their specific needs and goals. However, at the same time, the LEADER regions sometimes face similar challenges and can learn from each other's experiences, or even collaborate. In Austria, the LAGs discovered this added-value of strong cooperation.
LEADER Local Action Groups (LAGs) in Austria benefit from strong cooperation, which is brought to life through coordinated complementary actions by the Austrian National Network (NN) and LEADER Forum (a voluntary association in which all Austrian LAGs participate). Thanks to the NN and LEADER Forum for their help in producing this article about animating LEADER in Austria.
Austrian LAGs support the implementation of the national CAP Strategic Plan (CSP), and also provide input on other rural development opportunities. Highlighting how well-embedded LEADER methods have become in Austrian rural support systems, the NN explains: “We have 83 LAGs that cover much of the countryside. LAGs here are well known for their ability to help tackle different development challenges in effective and inclusive ways. A big success factor behind this is the cooperation and networking that happens regularly between all the LEADER stakeholders.”
Close links exist between the LAGs, the NN, and the Managing Authority and Paying Agency, as well as with the CSP Monitoring Committee. Good working relations between local and national levels facilitate effective operational arrangements. LAGs have their voices heard during high-level decision-making, and, reciprocally, the LAG network provides policies with a direct outreach channel to help implement development priorities at localised levels, and in a consistent manner.
Whilst all LAGs are adapted to their own territories, common approaches are known to provide advantages. LEADER animation support, which is funded by the CSP even in projects using multiple funding sources, promotes cooperation during the joint design of LEADER implementation systems. An example of this is the CSP monitoring system for LEADER that the NN and LEADER Forum helped LAGs to establish, through mutual agreement with the CSP Managing Authority and Paying Agency.
Common Monitoring
NN resources drove this animation activity, which was considered important by the NN because: “We wanted to strengthen the monitoring system and reformulate it. This aimed to help it work better for everyone. So we organised quite a long-term project to involve all LAGs in defining the way that LEADER’s broad achievements could be monitored and measured.”
The animation techniques used by the NN included wide stakeholder consultations with LAGs, combined with focused analysis by LAG practitioners and CSP specialists. This helped ensure that all users could fine-tune the LEADER systems to ensure that they were fit for their particular purposes. The final outcome was a set of hybrid solutions developed to accommodate the needs of all stakeholders. The active involvement of the different stakeholders helped make it inclusive, safeguarding against anyone feeling left behind in the process.
“Our monitoring system for LEADER is based on collective goals from the LAGs” observes the NN. “LAG perspectives and experiences were central during the preparatory phases, and this allowed us to establish indicators that were useful for everyone. Simplicity was needed too, so indicators were agreed on that were relatively easy to understand and apply. We decided to concentrate on changes and improvements in rural life that could be defined and measured consistently. We also set up a national framework outlining how to record qualitative outcomes, like how innovation, for example, can be clearly classified and attributed to LEADER.”
All this LEADER animation was aligned to ensure seamless contributions to the CSP’s monitoring mechanism. By agreeing a common national definition for different types of innovation (e.g. process innovation vs product innovation), the Austrian LAGs now operate within a legal certainty about how they will be assessed – both internally and externally.
“We have made our monitoring system better for everyone, and this will make it easier to identify LEADER’s added value in all its forms” states the LEADER Forum. “These animation processes build a lot of confidence and credibility in cooperation. We know each other, and we trust each other, and that is an added value of LEADER. By working together, we can do more. We feel more connected now. Before it might sometimes have felt like LAGs were acting quite individually, but now it feels like we are all connected more and looking in the same direction. At the same time, we are still able to support the specific local bottom-up needs in our LAG territories.”
Collective climate action
An innovative and common approach proved productive for confirming the bottom-up priorities of each Austrian LAG. Fields of action were defined as:
- economic competitiveness;
- nature and culture;
- common goods; and
- climate change adaptation and mitigation.
LAGs linked their Local Development Strategy (LDS) priorities to these national themes, and all the country’s LAGs now operate within this fixed, yet flexible programming framework for LEADER. It identified that climate action was a topic that many LAGs wanted to support. The monitoring system (see box) offered a menu of commonly and bottom-up defined indicators along these four topics, from which LAGs could choose. Indicators can monitor both the added value of LEADER (e.g. changes in social capital, innovation, or governance) and LAG thematic action (e.g. tourism or other rural economic development).
Reviewing the background to this new LEADER emphasis and LEADER’s tactical role as a climate policy tool, the NN explains that: “There was a lot of consensus that localised solutions were needed to reduce global climate challenges, and so we thought we could use LEADER as a useful part of the answer. We did this by offering LAGs the possibility to opt for climate action as a priority in their LDS. We hadn’t done this before. The menu approach was also new, and a significant number of our LAGs chose climate.”
It is now clear that there is a strong emphasis on climate actions across the Austrian LAGs. Such a critical mass of awareness can be harnessed to create momentum and resource future actions. An example of LAG-funded climate action in Austria was shared during the last meeting of the EU CAP Network’s Subgroup on LEADER and territorial development (SoLTD), and Austria looks well prepared to extend its expertise in locally-led climate actions during the 2023-2027 CSP lifespan.
Future planning
Austria’s LAGs are taking a longer-term outlook thanks to the LEADER Forum’s animation of an ‘Our Common Future’ initiative. This involves the LAGs, through the LEADER Forum, proactively forging and affirming their futures together. “Our LAGs are a main local development tool for our rural areas. LAGs for us are much more than administrative tools that implement funding programmes” stresses the LEADER Forum.
“We work on the basis that it is each LAG’s responsibility to do the best for LEADER. Our national CSP provides a key reference, and we want to be at the forefront of guiding our own local communities’ development directions from the bottom up. For us, it’s the LAGs’ job to use LEADER in the best way possible. Others can help us, but we in the LAGs are the main people who can make it happen in practice, and so that is why we organised the Our Common Future project.”
“All LAGs were part of the initiative, and meetings have regularly attracted large audiences of LAG representatives. The range of common issues covered is also large. For instance, we agree within our Forum that LAG potential can be boosted significantly by using the LEADER process to provide other funding support, directly at local level where it is most needed. We see this happening with LAGs targeting CSP funds to complement other EU or national support sources.”
Austrian experiences with using LEADER like this (as a magnet and/or catalyst to attract additional or coordinated rural development support at local levels) are expected to continue to grow in importance during the LAGs’ common future. Their networking success in this initiative shows how well LEADER processes can help provide a full spectrum of rural support.
Continuous improvements
Sustaining and strengthening LEADER’s position and potential in Austria is aided by dedicated Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Run by the NN, the MOOCs are designed to ensure LEADER support is continuously improving and “not just a series of isolated one-off events”. The MOOCs provide a continuity of capacity-building support for LAGs wherever and wherever they need it most.
Both the NN and LEADER Forum are of the opinion that “knowledge investment is key to resilience. We need knowledge for LAGs that is specific, not off-the-shelf, so these MOOCs have been designed to fit closely with the LAG needs. Our oversight of all the LAGs helps us to understand and ‘harvest’ common priorities covering all their needs. We use this evidence-led approach to inform the development of MOOCs' content to support the LAGs.”
“It helps us make best use of all the different practitioner experience we collectively have as a network in Austria. We benefit from the hindsight of three decades implementing LEADER, and the MOOCs act as an institutional memory source capturing, organising, and re-sharing all this knowledge for current and future LEADER peers.”
You can contact and follow the Austrian National Network (NN) and LEADER Forum to stay updated with all the latest LEADER developments in Austria.
Monitoring LEADER in Austria
Success conditions for Austria’s new LEADER monitoring systems were presented at the Evaluation Helpdesk workshop on evaluating LEADER added value. Further information is available from the Austrian NN.
Affordability is a core consideration for the monitoring system, which the NN notes is designed to use “data that must be available at LAG level or can be collected with reasonable effort”, with the aim to “keep the system as lean as possible”.
Its indicators tracking added value and other LEADER achievements span across established Austrian LEADER themes, such as business competitiveness, cultural and natural resources, public goods/ public services, and social cohesion. These are now complemented by new possibilities for monitoring LAG contributions to climate change adaptation and mitigation.
An interesting approach to understanding LEADER added value uses mandatory metrics. These can help clarify social capital changes attributed to LEADER’s CAP funding. Indicators here record:
- Cooperation within projects;
- Cooperation across regional and national borders; and
- Civil society/ civil engagement.
Governance and democracy added-value is monitored by:
- Participation (opportunities, diversity, dynamic);
- Overcoming of ‘local thinking’; and
- Additional financial resources.
The third central indicator of LAG added value in Austria aims to gather insights on the quality of results and innovation. Its indicators comprise:
- Innovative outcomes of LEADER work (embracing different types of innovation noted below);
- Durability of initiatives/ impacts;
- LEADER’s support phase of a project (concept, implementation, sustainable continuity);
- Knowledge transfer; and
- Jobs (created, secured).
Indications of impacts result from assessing “what exactly has changed” and data is also disaggregated by beneficiary type. LAGs and the NN can use their monitoring systems to provide such evidence and confirm project goal achievements for managerial decision-making.
Innovation successes can be understood and compared in terms of:
- Process innovations;
- Product innovations;
- Marketing and business model innovations;
- Structural innovations;
- Social innovations; as well as
- Innovations with a digitalisation aspect.
Thematic data collection fields can monitor a portfolio of LAG performance such as support to tourism (including sustainable mobility), rural craft sectors, biodiversity, the circular economy, food, agriculture, and more.
